Sharing Usernames

In light of some recent questions regarding whether or not it is allowable for authors to share a username when they post a story together, hopefully this thread will clear up any misconceptions.

Sharing a username among two or more people is not generally allowed in the forums, as it causes headaches with the enforcement of rules. The "my little brother did it" excuse potentially becomes "one of the other people using this name must have done it" excuse.

Regardless of this, username sharing has continued in the fanfic forums due to the convenience factor when two or more people are co-writing a story. Or, people honestly haven't known that name sharing wasn't allowed. The practice has been generally overlooked because, well, fanficcers don't use these shared accounts to cause trouble.

Given this fact, the fanfic mods have gotten together and come up with some guidelines that will be specific to the forums here in fanfic and nowhere else at the JC. It shouldn't cause any undue headaches and will allow us mods a matter of recourse should forum rules be broken.


1) Shared usernames (or 'socks') must be "registered" with the mods so that we have a convenient list of names to check and so that we can update usernotes properly to keep track of who's who.

2) These shared story socks may not be used outside of the story forums. This includes the Resource forum (outside of exceptions to be covered below).

3) Shared socks that are used for Indexes and Awards will be limited to their appropriate threads in Resource.

4) Should there be a TOS violation from a shared account, the ban will likewise be shared among everyone who uses this shared username.

5) In the instance that somebody accidentally posts elsewhere by forgetting to log out of the shared sock, it is up to them to PM a notification to one of the fanfic mods and they must edit that post to state who actually posted it.



Now, to 'register' a shared account, all you need to do is send a PM to one of the fanfic mods providing the shared username and the usernames of the people sharing it.

Other than the fact that the fanfic mods would now like to have an easy reference to shared accounts in the unlikely event that there's a problem, this is really nothing more than writing out something that's been 'unofficially' going on for some time.


Questions? Comments? Complaints?

 

Sounds like a reasonable solution to me. Good job, mods.

 

I think that's fair for those who share accounts.

 

Cool. Glad to have this policy clarified.

 

Sounds good to me and answers some questions I had.

 

Coolness. Good one Mods! ~Gabby